Inbox zero: it's the impossible dream that gets further and further away as you let your emails pile up, but you don't have to get stuck with the clutter. Thanks to an awesome webapp called Mailstrom, I finally got my thousand-email inbox under control in an hour. Here's how.

Inbox zero is a lofty and often unachievable dream for most, and for a long time I just assumed that piles of email would rule my life. Almost by accident, I came across a webapp called Mailstrom and, along with other options, decided to give it a try. After playing around with it for an hour, I noticed something strange: my inbox was virtually empty. I had gone from about 1,000 emails to about 50, replied to the most important, and found myself at zero all while watching an episode of Breaking Bad. In fact, it happened so fast that I thought it was a mistake. Mailstrom doesn't do anything particularly mind-blowing or new, and you could do a lot of the same stuff with some fancy Gmail filters, but it's free to use indefinitely and requires far less effort. On top of that, it works with any email account, not just Gmail. If you want to get to inbox zero and even watch a little television in the process, this post will show you how it's done.

Step One: Link Your Email Accounts with Mailstrom

Mailstrom's pretty easy to set up. Just follow these steps:

Sign up for a Mailstrom account by entering your email address. (If you have more than one, don't worry—you'll be able to add more later.) Mailstrom will ask for your email account's IMAP servers and credentials so it can access your mail. If you have a Gmail (or Google Apps) account, you can just authenticate directly with Google. Either way, finish the signup process and log in. (Note: if you're concerned about data privacy, check out Mailstrom's privacy policy to make sure you're comfortable with it.)

If you have additional email accounts to add, look for the "Mail Accounts" dropdown menu in the upper-righthand corner of the webapp. Click it and choose "Add Account" until you've added all of your email accounts. Clearing out your inboxes will go much faster if you add all your accounts in the beginning. After adding each account, Mailstrom will take a minute or two to index your messages.

While indexing is taking place, click on the "Mail Accounts" dropdown again and choose the Settings page. While there's not much you can do here yet, familiarizing yourself with the page will help once you get started because you can see where you'll manage various aspects of your account, such as unsubscriptions (to newsletters) and message moving rules. Mailstrom also sends out an "inbox suggestions" email on a daily basis by default. If this is too frequent for you, change it to weekly or monthly and click the Mailstrom logo on the top left to go back.

With your settings in order, you just need to wait for indexing to finish. Chances are it'll be done by the time you get back to the main page, but if you've got plenty of messages in your account it may take a few minutes. When complete, you're ready to start clearing out the clutter.

Step Two: Remove Yourself From Unnecessary Mailing Lists

Your inbox contains a variety of different messages, but it'll fill up fast with mailing lists if you're subscribed to enough of them. As a first step, unsubscribe yourself from as many as possible. To do this, click the "Lists" section from the menu on the left. You'll find all your message views in Mailstrom through that menu, and we'll learn about the others later, so don't worry about the others yet.

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In List view you'll see the mailing lists that you are 1) subscribed to and 2) appear in your inbox. If they are not in your inbox, you won't see them in this view which is why it's important to start the cleaning process here. To start, select any mailing list from the middle pane and you'll see the most recent message or a list of recent messages from that sender. Up on the top left, you'll see a big orange "Unsubscribe" button. Click it if you want to unsubscribe, or click the green "Archive" button to simply remove it from your inbox for now. Most of what you'll do in Mailstrom involves selecting messages you want to remove from your inbox and clicking that green "Archive" button, but when in the Lists section you'll want to unsubscribe from as many as possible rather than simply remove them so they don't cause clutter in the future. When you're finished, we'll plan an attack the rest.

Step Three: Learn Your Email's Patterns

Mailstrom helps you view and sort your email in new ways so you can clear out your inbox, but it also teaches you about your email's behavior in the process. Although not the primary purpose, each view offers statistics. You can see who you ignore email from the most, when the majority of your email comes in, who sends you messages with large attachments, which social networks clutter up your inbox, and more. Don't just let this information pass you by—learn from it so you can prevent your inbox from becoming cluttered again in the future.

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Before we start clearing things out and getting you to inbox zero, let's take a look at each view and how you can use the information you find to reduce the number of emails you get:

Sender: Mailstrom will sort your inbox by sender and put the most frequent senders up at the top. This way you can see who's filling up your inbox the most. Consider the top 10 and why you're getting so much email from them. Figure out if there's a way to reduce it, or if you're simply ignoring them and leaving their messages in your inbox.

Subject: This view groups emails by subject, which isn't much different from how you see them in your inbox already. That said, you can benefit by using the filter search up top. Filter search exists regardless of the view, but in the subject view you can filter by—you guessed it—subject. This can be useful to figure out what words appear in your email subjects more often than not. If you see a pattern, try filtering on the relevant term to get an idea of what you're talking about in most of your emails. Is it necessary or useful? If not, consider how you can cut back on a given subject that's wasting your time.

Lists: We covered the list view in the previous section. It's where you can unsubscribe from mailing lists.

Time: Time shows you when certain emails came in. Do you have more really old emails or more from today? Ultimately you want your inbox to consist more of recent emails, so if you have many old ones you should look through them later and make the tough decision: answer now or hit the delete key.

Social: Social networks love to send you notifications to get you back on their sites. You'll find all those notifications in this view. If you're getting too many from one network, log in and adjust your notifications settings so they don't bury important emails in your inbox. Mailstrom can filter these out for you automatically, but we'll talk more about that in the next step.

Shopping: Emails in this view relate to shopping, and are just another kind of notification. Perhaps Amazon's reminding you to check out a new product or you're just getting a lot of receipts in your inbox that you don't necessarily need. If this is the case, just filter them out (using the process described in the next step) or adjust your settings with online retailers so you don't receive emails you don't want.

Size: Size isn't particularly useful for learning your email's patterns unless you get a lot of emails with giant attachments. If certain people keep sending you large files at regular intervals, you'll see that here and should ask them to stop.

Once you've learned your email's patterns and made any relevant adjustments, you can make your way to inbox zero.

Step Four: Make Some Rules

Mailstrom helps keep your inbox organized by filtering out messages you may want to have available (e.g. shopping receipts) but don't necessarily need to see in your inbox. The feature works much like Gmail filters, but with any email provider.

To set up a rule, just select any number of messages in a particular view and click the blue "Move" button at the top right. Mailstrom will ask you where you want to move the messages. You can choose any folder or label in your account. There's nothing inherently special about this action, except you'll also see a little checkbox every time you move something. It'll ask you if you want to perform this action automatically in the future when similar emails arrive. If you check it, you've set up a rule. (Remember, you'll find existing rules on your Settings page and can remove them there later on.) This will help clean up your inbox automatically so you don't have to bother.

Step Five: Get to Inbox Zero

Getting to inbox zero is actually the easy part. Now that you know all of Mailstrom's views and what they can do for you, and you've set up rules to keep your inbox in good order, just work your way through each and start archiving messages you don't care about.

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Clearing out a bunch of messages doesn't take much effort. The hard part comes in when you have to decide which messages are important enough to keep and respond to and which ones aren't. You'll need to make some tough decisions. You've already taken action to help keep your inbox empty, so don't feel too bad if you didn't reply to a somewhat important email two months ago. You've already dropped the ball, so archiving that message likely won't make matters worse. If you really want to reply, you can always send a simply message like this:

Sorry I've been out of touch and your message got lost in my inbox. Do you still need my help with this?

Obviously that message is a little broad, so feel free to tailor it to the matter at hand. Just keep messages brief and to the point. If you need to act on them, the sender will reply and let you know. If not, you don't have to do anything more.

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While this may seem tedious, you'll reach inbox zero a lot faster than you may expect. Because Mailstrom's views group similar emails together so well, you'll power through your archiving tasks in no time. I found the Sender view to help me the most, but you'll likely have a favorite after you've explored the various views. Before you know it, you'll be at zero and you'll be more likely to stay there thanks to all the actions you took and rules you set up earlier.

What About the Future?

No matter what you do, email can still pile up. If you set up Mailstrom to do most of the work, you'll have an easier time keeping a clean inbox without ever really using the webapp again. If things get out of hand, however, Mailstrom's there to help you out. Just log in, repeat these steps again, and create more aggressive rules. No matter what tools you use, a clean inbox requires effort on your part. Mailstrom just makes the job a lot easier.